Soiled Shield
by The Madmadam
Summary: "And be on the run?" Her dehydrated body, not being accustomed to volume above a whisper, created an impotent rasp."No. I relish my freedom. If I get out of here, I'm not going to have a litter of people on my trail. I don't live that way. I don't work that way." "No one can touch me." He hunched so he could meet her eyes exactly level. "Join me, and they'll avoid you too." SPOIL!
**WARNING: freaking ginormous spoilers for LIE. Also trigger warning: self harm and suicide. Same spiel as for Death's Ambrosia, basically. Also, fun fact: this story is a supplement to Breaking Hades, although it doesn't reveal any spoilers for it since I don't plan on getting any further into this material for that story.**

 **This fic is dedicated to SheBroughtWordsToLife, who had the brilliant idea of shipping Xenia/Thanos in the first place. (Speaking of their names, I couldn't use the character tags for this story, since those plus the summary would've equalled big spoilers.) Unfortunately she seems to have fallen off the face of the fandom, so I am writing this in an attempt to entice her back. Come to the dark side! We have cookies...**

Thanos rose from the water like a Christ bitten by Lucifer.

Or perhaps Xenia was Christ, and he was Saint Peter.

The high sides of the Vernon C. Bain Maritime Facility greeted his swimming-weary eyes. With his last working sinew he produced a grappling hook and hurled it above the deck. And like a drowning man gasping he went forth to claim his wintry queen.

It has been years since he's left the Underworld, millennia since he's crossed the Styx toward its greener bank. In stories Hades was a kidnapper, an enabler, possibly a rapist. But when maternal viragos threatened to steal close possessions, he tightened his grip. When something was taken from him, he retrieved it.

Retrieved her.

Thanos' work only became harder from there, involving deposing seven guards on his way to Xenia's cell. But like himself, he forgot, mind clearing after every pressed windpipe. The knife inside his jacket stayed there: no sense in causing a mess.

Meticulously he worked his way through all of the cells. Most inmates didn't even acknowledge his presence. Some backed away like he was a shadow. Xenia's cell lay beyond them all.

One glance was all Thanos needed to determine that Xenia was never meant to be behind bars. Sagging blue lines formed unbroken semicircles around her eyes, which were a duller ocher abdicated from carob. Her dark hair, first lively, has become stringy. Yellow bruises stained her olive skin.

It was late, but she was not asleep.

Now she eyed him with little fanfare other than a paltry smile.

In a former lifetime—i.e., his youth—Thanos might have been disappointed; she more resembled the victim Persephone today than she ever had before. Now he knew that she could likely muster no more strength for a greater show of affection.

"Where are the guards?" she asked, amused.

"Sleeping." Thanos replied.

"Anything to get more blood on your hands, right?"

"You know me better than that, Xenia."

"I know. But it's what you're best at." Walking forward on wobbly twigs masquerading as legs, she wrapped her shaking fingers around the bars. "Nothing wrong with that. I read on Grigor's tablet that he thought there was a problem you couldn't kill your way out of. He was wrong. He's wrong about most things."

Thanos' eyebrows rose slightly. "You are in lively spirits."

"I have no friends here." She pulled her face closer to the bars, leaning it against her palms. "Now I have you."

Thanos had no response for this, and he suspected the silence would not put off Xenia. She never seemed to be fond of idle chatter.

"You know me. Friends are a luxury for the misunderstood and—"

"—Making friends may help you procure an early release."

"Oh, trust me." She halted him with a cutting laugh. "I'm not going anywhere."

"I've come this far. You can leave with me."

"And be on the run?" Xenia's voice rose although her dehydrated body, not being accustomed to pushing volume above a whisper, created an impotent rasp. "No. I relish my freedom. If I get out of here, I'm not going to have a litter of people on my trail. I don't live that way. I don't work that way."

"No one can touch me." Thanos curled his own fingers around the bars, wider arms encircling hers. He hunched so he could meet her eyes exactly level. "Join me, and they'll avoid you too."

"Then I'd be depending on you, which is absolutely unacceptable."

Thanos paused, eyes taking in her angular frame. "You're unhappy here."

"I don't relish the thought of spending 15 years here. I slept with the DA and it still happened that way. If femininity can't be used for this, what use does it have?" Her hands clenched tighter, going white. "You'd think I'm as charming as Grigor but apparently not."

Thanos chuckled. "Darling, you're more charming than Grigor. Perhaps he will be free again in a year, but his life after that can be miserable. Can be made miserable."

Xenia's smile lowered along with her eyes. "Kill him for me, will you?"

"Gladly."

"All that stupid flattery, that little sob story," Her lips bunched forward into an unsightly grimace, and her forehead dissolved into wrinkles, "that asinine sob story about being an orphan so he's always trying to make people like him so they'll stick around or so he'll get to live. Why does he deserve to live?"

"And what of your little sob story, the happy girl who fell into a vast sadness?"

"Me?" She scoffed. "Never. That was for the Drew girl's ears, not yours."

"I have keen hearing."

"I've never doubted myself in my life." She hunched forward, her forehead dashing against the metal. Thanos feared for the metal. "If I got out of here, everything would be fine."

"Then come with me."

"I can't, Thanos. Prison is a state of mind that won't go away until my sentence is over." She looked up at him again, eyes newly bloodshot. "Do I have to tell you what they do to me in here? They won't let me talk to anyone!"

"Well, I fixed that problem." Thanos gave a jerk of a nod.

"This is all wrong. I know dwelling won't do me any good, but," she blinked and took a deep breath, "but I can't get off the thought that it could've happened, the heist. Not perfectly, not with Grigor pulling his fences like that, but if it weren't for Nancy coming in, we could've pulled it off. Grigor could've taken the fall. Niobe could've been in Brazil with her stupid mouth shut. You and I could've—"

Thanos extricated his left hand from the bar and instead touched her index finger, the only part of her he has left. "Go on," he said quietly.

"We could have done well for ourselves. Enough money for me to help out my folks, then enough left over for us to do whatever we wanted for the rest of our lives."

"That is still an option, Xenia."

Xenia shook her head with a scathing laugh, opting to change the subject. "When I say kill Grigor, I mean kill Grigor. I don't want him to live while I have to rot in here. In fact…" Her voice broke, and she stopped talking.

"You do not wish to be alive either."

"You always did know me." Slowly she raised her head. "Come closer."

Thanos complied.

"No, I don't want to be alive. And I've been thinking a while about how you can help me with that."

For a few seconds Thanos considered this. "You have been thinking about this for a while?" he repeated.

"Yes."

"How did you know I would come for you?"

"Because there's nobody in the world like you and me. You know what life is and what life isn't. It's absurd, is all it is. All we can do is secure our own pleasure. We surround ourselves with money and the death of our stooges. Because they're going to kill us if we don't kill them first."

"And here, they are killing you."

"Yes." Unable to reach for his arm, she held him with her stare. "If they think you killed me, they would stay away from you times infinity. Kill Grigor, and it magnifies. No one would dare cross you then, not even that reckless Drew girl. Think of all the power you'd have, the mobility. You could do anything you want."

"And so can you, if you come with me."

"But it won't last. I don't want to come back here. And they'll find me if I leave, and they'll just bring me back here but worse and for longer."

Bending forward until his face was six inches from hers, Thanos lowered his voice. "I will find every witness and silence him. I will not be going to prison, and you will not be going back to prison."

"It's not a question of witnesses. For you, maybe it is. You slipped through their fingers. But I've already been sentenced."

Thanos worked to stifle his impatience. "I have told you all I can tell you. There is nothing else."

"Then listen to me when I say I don't want to live anymore. Help me."

"Quiet, Xenia. You are not thinking."

"I need your help. I've tried. They're making me eat. Look, I know you have a million and one ways to kill a person on you now."

Thanos turned away without reply.

"I'll give you a long list of how they treat people in here." Xenia's voice went shrill.

"Do not try to manipulate me. I need to think about this."

"No, don't think about this. Think about _me_. How would you feel if you were locked up?"

He moved to face Xenia again, but not because of any of her tricks. For a bleak, bare second she had sounded like Persephone. Young. Afraid.

Powerless.

"You can learn things from prison. Make friends and talk to them. Learn their methods, and when you're out, you will not get caught again." Walking forward once again to where Xenia's hands were still twined around the bars of her cage, he lay two fingers over one of her thin wrists. "You have a future, Xenia, and it is not here. Come with me. Would you not like to kill Grigor yourself?"

Xenia bit her lip in contemplation.

"I can show you everything I have learned from taking a life. I can see that you crave it. Kill those who may wrong you and live on their blood. Don't die and be their sustenance instead."

The last sentence made her sour somehow. "Why are you resisting me on this? If you think lives are meaningless, then prove it. Prove it by helping me prove it to myself."

"Perhaps I am wrong," Thanos replied without creating an opportunity for silence.

Xenia's head snapped up, revealing startled eyes.

"You are not nothing to me. You are not absurd, nor is your life. Come with me, and perhaps I will remember how to live again." His fingers squeezed tighter around her wrist. "My life begins where others' end. I am the opposite of them. You are right, though. You and I are the same."

"My life ends where others feed it," Xenia responded without missing a beat. "My life ends when I join you. So where your life will begin, mine will end. Your life and mine cannot align now. That ended the second I couldn't fend for myself. Look at me. This isn't agency. This isn't choice or power."

"My life begins with yours." Thanos raised his voice over hers. "You are not thinking clearly. And I shall take you out of here living whether or not it is your will."

"I am thinking clearly. My parents disowned me. After everything I tried to do for them, they won't visit me." Her eyes steeled. "And if you take me out of here against my will, I will kill myself and frame you."

Grimly he nodded. "I believe you."

Her eyebrows drew into a steep incline. "Then help me!"

Carefully hesitant, Thanos read every line in her face before continuing. "There is help, Xenia. Not the help you're looking for."

"Therapy, right? Hah! Do you think I'll have that luxury after escaping from prison? They'll find me and bring me back for longer!"

"I have friends in Greece. You know this. We can return there, and you can have whatever you need."

"I only need one thing, Thanos, and that's the thing you're best at doing."

Finally too weary, Thanos didn't attempt to hide his displeasure. "Is that what I am to you?"

"It always has been. And honestly, what's wrong with that?"

"Is that all I will ever be to you?" Thanos disregarded her question.

For at least thirty seconds she didn't respond. Then, "Yes."

"It is all I am now. This is true," Thanos admitted. "But I am confident your company can change that."

"I am bitter beyond repair."

"I do not like to disappoint, but if I am not beyond repair, then neither are you."

"We're not capable of change. And we should not change. Remember me before I lose any more of my former self. I'll remember you at your most capable. At one point we could've been happy together. But there is no recovering from this life. I will never be able to make you happy now, and you will never make me happy."

Thanos fell silent.

"I've wanted to kill myself since I was sixteen." Xenia added. "This is not new."

"Then you did fall into a vast sadness."

"I did," she said almost inaudibly.

"Do you not want even a moment of freedom, to be outside of prison before dying?"

"No." She closed her eyes and shook her head vehemently. "I don't want to see any vestige of my former life. Being taunted by what I can't have will only bring me pain. You know that."

Ignoring her, Thanos started at the lock on her cell.

Xenia protested weakly, but Thanos, intent on his task, did not hear specific words, only the reproachful tone of her voice. When he finished, she pulled him to her and buried her face in his neck.

Perhaps Thanos should have been surprised by such a reaction. He wasn't. There was something, but it soon dissipated into his characteristic numbness before he could identify the feeling.

A gasp pulled him out of the stupor and embrace.

Xenia's chest flowered crimson. Her hands weakened at his elbows.

And Thanos' empty sheath lay light in his jacket.

"Oh, Xenia," he said. And for the moment he still had the chance he seized her lips.

A rescue, a quarrel, a marriage, a guild of common blood.

Xenia fell from him and began coughing violently.

A parting.

Thanos did not blink as Xenia slumped away to the wall and slid. Her eyes, on him, turned glass and nebulous. She collapsed on herself, reaching the underworld before reaching the ground.

Two drops of blood sank into his jacket. From her lungs a sentient, crimson breath, the last one, life in bed with death.

Gently he extricated the knife from her small, firm fingers. After wiping it on his blouse, he gripped the handle for several seconds. His free hand went to Xenia's. For some moments he closed his eyes, exhaled, inhaled. Forced himself not to think.

Then laid the knife down out of her reach, her fingerprints replaced with his own.

Leaving the cell door ajar, Thanos retraced his steps to the deck and Long Island Sound, or Styx. For a moment his feet almost stopped before he reminded himself of the folly of staying here. At least he can keep the jacket as a souvenier, he thought wryly. Depleting his lungs of air, he dove back into the murky night-dimmed water.

 **This story has a number of influences. The religious reverence Thanos holds for Xenia is heavily inspired by Hozier's wrenching "Take Me To Church," to which I listened on repeat while writing this. (Is that the sort of sentence that would've made more sense had I ended it on a preposition? Alas, I can't tell. Too tired.) The whole piece is inspired by Plato's dialogue _Crito_ , in which the title character offers to break Socrates out of prison and gives him a laundry list of reasons why he should escape. Apparently imminent death doesn't convince him to do so because Socrates is weird like that. (Spoiler alert: Socrates, like Xenia, refuses.) Crito makes a big deal out of mentioning that Socrates will be killed when the ship from Delos returns to Athens, so when I found out there was a prison ship in NYC (Xenia's native heath), I of course had to use it as the setting for her prison term.**

 **Also, I verrrrrry conveniently used the "Thanos doesn't think" interpretation from my former story to gloss over the entire process of breaking into a prison, since I have no idea how that could be done. When it comes to being a lazy author, I stand guilty as charged.**


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